The clip from the six o’clock news would be enough to break Willie Nelson’s heart—5,525 pounds of seized marijuana, lined up like sandbags in a flood in front of a Cook County police vehicle.

That’s over two tons of dried cannabis, more than the weight of a pick-up truck, or enough to make a man listen to “Dark Side of the Moon” all day, every day for the rest of his natural life.

The contraband cheeba in question—all $20 million worth—was seized in a house in the southwest suburb of Lyons, according to the Sun-Times. Now the Cook County sheriff’s office gets to strut around proud as peacocks for a few weeks, and some mope named Frederico Moreno is staring down six to 30 for a charge of manufacturing and delivering cannabis. Totally harsh, man.

But now it looks like what’s really intruding on the buzz of marijuana advocates is what to do with all those pounds of police-possessed sticky-icky-icky. The sheriff’s department planned to file for a court order allowing them to incinerate all but 10,000 grams, which I’d guess is probably still enough for a few years of mind-blowing trips to Taco Bell.

On Monday, the Sun-Times ran quotes from some folks with chronic diseases feel incinerating all that grass would be the equivalent of flushing a few thousand pounds of penicillin down the drain. For all I know, they might be right.

I’m not the biggest advocate for marijuana use in the world—I don’t use it, and my experience in high school and college has been that pretty much everyone is less interesting while on drugs—but it seems like a shame even to me to just burn the whole mess of it.

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